The Penta Swing State Snapshot: Presidential Debate Night

What issues will Harris and Trump focus on during the September 10 debate?

As the September 10 presidential debate approaches, the stage is set for the first—and potentially only—head-to-head matchup between Harris and Trump. This debate represents a crucial opportunity for the candidates to directly appeal to swing voters and draw a clear distinction on the issues that matter most.
 
Recent public polls indicate the economy, immigration, and abortion are top concerns among voters. Penta’s Swing State Snapshot examines how these issues are playing out in major media markets across the seven pivotal swing states that will determine the outcome of the 2024 election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Latest Snapshot: Abortion, housing, and inflation continue to dominate media coverage and visibility across swing states

The 2024 election will hinge on a small group of swing state voters, with campaigns vying for their support through earned and paid media. From front-page headlines in local newspapers to lead stories on local news broadcasts, swing state voters are inundated with campaign coverage that could influence their decisions up until Election Day.
 
Penta’s Swing State Snapshot has analyzed media visibility across all seven swing states, revealing several key trends:

• Abortion, housing, and inflation are consistently the most visible issues across all seven swing states.
• Immigration currently has lower visibility compared to these other issues in the top swing state media markets.
  
  

A closer look at individual swing states shows some variation in issue prominence over the past week:

• In Arizona and Pennsylvania, abortion is the most visible issue.
• In Georgia and Michigan, the economic concerns of housing and inflation take the lead.
• In North Carolina and Wisconsin, inflation stands out prominently.
• In Nevada, the housing crisis is the most visible issue.

As the candidates and campaigns enter the final stretch of what is anticipated to be a highly competitive election season, with races ranging from the presidential contest to control of Congress, expect a heightened focus on these key issues with major visibility in swing states. Beginning with the September 10 debate, campaigns will intensify their efforts to sway the last undecided voters leading up to Election Day.

Swing State Snapshot: Analysis Powered by Penta 

The Swing State Snapshot uses Penta’s real-time global media database to track candidate visibility and sentiment of mentions in the largest newspapers and local broadcast television stations in the top three markets in the top seven “swing states”, based on their narrow margins of victory during the 2020 presidential election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Visibility is Penta's metric for measuring how companies, people, and issues appear in content. The measure incorporates the volume of mentions, the reach and influence of the source, the prominence of the mention in the content, and how relevant the content is to the entity mentioned. Penta has developed a custom Sentiment scoring engine that calculates sentiment of every mention of each candidate on a scale of -100 to +100, trained on billions of records and tuned every day by our analysts.